Potential of Biological Agents in Decontamination of Agricultural Soil

Abstract

Pesticides are widely used for the control of weeds, diseases, and pests of cultivated plants all over the world, mainly since the period after the Second World War. The use of pesticides is very extensive to control harm of pests all over the globe. Persistent nature of most of the synthetic pesticides causes serious environmental concerns. Decontamination of these hazardous chemicals is very essential. This review paper elaborates the potential of various biological agents in decontamination of agricultural soils. The agricultural crop fields are contaminated by the periodic applications of pesticides. Biodegradation is an ecofriendly, cost-effective, highly efficient approach compared to the physical and chemical methods which are expensive as well as unfriendly towards environment. Biodegradation is sensitive to the concentration levels of hydrogen peroxide and nitrogen along with microbial community, temperature, and pH changes. Experimental work for optimum conditions at lab scale can provide very fruitful results about specific bacterial, fungal strains. This study revealed an upper hand of bioremediation over physicochemical approaches. Further studies should be carried out to understand mechanisms of biotransformation.

Characterization of the biodegradation, bioremediation and detoxification capacity of a bacterial consortium able to degrade the fungicide thiabendazole

“…population density of pesticide-degrading microorganisms) and abiotic (i.e. temperature, pH and pesticide concentration) (Zhang et al 2010;Song et al 2013;Javaid et al 2016). Ideally, microbial transformation of pesticides will result in complete mineralization, leading to final transformation products like pyruvate or acetaldehyde which are used as energy sources in bacterial metabolism (Fetzner 2002).…”

Laboratory Study for Biodegradation of Oxymatrine Insecticide by Single and Mixed Cultures of Fungi Isolated from Agriculture Soils in Basrah Governorate, Iraq

“…At 4 ppm of oxymatrine insecticide for 10 days A.flavus, Exerohilum sp., Fusarium sp. and Ulocladium sp., showed higher degradation rate and this indicate that these fungi were not affected by insecticides and also they proved their ability to degrade wide range of insecticides and they used oxymatrine insecticide as a carbon and energy source under aerobic conditions (26,27) while A. niger and A. fumigatus showed the lowest degradation rate and that not mean they unable to degraded oxymatrine insecticide but may be they need more time or the conditions may be not suitable for them (28).…”

Phytoremediation and Bioremediation of Pesticide-Contaminated Soil

“…In healthy soils there are bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, arthropods, and earthworms. Bacteria and fungi are important for biodegradation of pesticides and other organic matter [59,114,191,199,200]. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are associated with plant roots and rhizodegradation, and they improve ecological health [115,218].…”

“…The remediation of pesticides in soil and ground water is important because of public health, the need for healthy productive soils, and for drinking water that is safe to consume. There are several reviews of research on the remediation processes for pesticide contaminated soil [4,13,21,34,40,78,111,114,122,147,163,192,200,214,219,222,223,228,236,262,[274][275][276][277][278][279][280][281]283,284]. The review on physicochemical remediation processes [275] is a very recent addition to the literature, and the review on bioaugmentation [277] was published in 2017.…”